This $530 tablet is better than a book or a sketchpad — it looks, feels, and acts just like paper

According to Magnus Wanberg, there are two types of people in the world: Those who do everything digitally, and "paper people" — those who prefer reading actual books or writing in notebooks.

It's the latter group that inspired Wanberg and his team to create the reMarkable tablet, a device that looks, feels, and acts like paper.

"We just had this idea that we fell in love with: A device that could take the paper experience but add digital power on top, because paper is so limited," Wanberg, the founder and CEO of reMarkable, told Business Insider.

So Wanberg started asking around, trying to see if anyone else felt the same way he did.

"We found a resounding ‘yes.’ This was an unsolved problem," he said.

Wanberg and his team in Oslo, Norway, set out to build the tablet, eliciting the help of Japanese company E Ink, the leading creators of electronic ink for ebooks.

Four years later, reMarkable is debuting its tablet for paper people, a device designed to do three things: Read, write, and sketch. The device costs $529, with the accompanying pen retailing for $79.

In the past, tablets like the reMarkable have struggled with one problem: lag. While others have tried to create a tablet for drawing and writing, the display has typically been too slow — your drawing will end up chasing your pen rather than appearing as soon as your pen touches the screen. But reMarkable figured out a way to solve that problem.

reMarkable

When the reMarkable team first got in touch with E Ink, the company said what they wanted to do wasn't possible. But Wanberg didn't listen.

"We were young and dumb and thought, ‘Alright, let’s have a crack at this. We’re engineers, we can maybe solve this,’" Wanberg said. "At the same time, we assumed also quite arrogantly that we would solve this. So we started on some product development in parallel tracks from early 2014."

By 2015, the team came up with a solution for the lag problem and took it back to Taiwan to show E Ink.

"Their jaw just hit the floor," Wanberg said.

And because they'd already been working on product development on the hardware side, the reMarkable team was able to fast-track production of their tablet.

What resulted from their efforts is a thin, lightweight tablet and accompanying pen that writes and draws instantly. I had the chance to try reMarkable's 7th generation prototype, and was immediately impressed by how quick it was and how effortlessly the pen glided across the screen. It felt a lot like, well, paper.

reMarkable

reMarkable offers a variety of brushes — like a felt tip pen or a pencil — that you can change on the screen. There are also tools like an eraser, a clone tool, and the ability to create layers, all with the intention that the tablet should be able to replace a sketch pad.

reMarkable

There are also various types of paper, like ruled paper or graph paper, for taking notes, making graphs, or creating architectural drawings.

reMarkable

reMarkable also allows you to read documents and textbooks, annotate them, and highlight them. While it can be used for reading for pleasure, the device is geared toward students, academics, and professionals.

reMarkable

The tablet can connect to WiFi, so you can share documents by email. Importantly, the tablet doesn't have an email app (or any other app, for that matter).

reMarkable

"Right now, there’s no email, there’s no Twitter, there’s no social media," Wanberg said. "We could have put a lot of stuff on here that we didn’t. But we would consider it blasphemy to do that to this kind of product."

The device is instead intended to be a complement to your other devices. The reMarkable team doesn't see it as a competitor to an iPad, Kindle, or Microsoft Surface, but rather a replacement for printing out documents, carrying around notebooks, or drawing on a sketchpad.

"This is a device that cultivates concentration," Wanberg said.

There's also an accompanying iPhone and desktop app so you can back up your notes, drawings, and documents on reMarkable's cloud.

reMarkable

reMarkable hasn't said how long exactly the battery will last, but Wanberg aims to have it last about five days, so you can use it during the week and charge it during the weekend.

reMarkable

Eventually, reMarkable will be able to recognize your handwriting and sort your documents based on whether they're drawings or notes. That feature already works on earlier prototypes and will be available later on as a software update.

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reMarkable hosted a six-month-long preorder campaign earlier this year where they sold over $11 million worth of tablets, or about 30,000 devices.

reMarkable

The company says it's on track to ship the first tablets in late August. If someone were to order a tablet today, they'd receive it in October.

The tablet currently costs $529, but Wanberg hopes to bring that price down over time.

reMarkable

"We absolutely acknowledge that the price point is higher than we’d like it to be," Wanberg said. "It’s expensive to make these big digital paper displays in small quantities. But the response that we’ve had, if that continues, we can work down the cost and we can work it down a lot. It is our explicit goal to get the price down. We want to see the product in as many people’s hands as possible."